<p>I come from a middle-class family and I transferred to Vandy last year. The average SAT scores of the students in my former school were in the bottom 20th-30th percentile of the United States (back then, I was a penniless music student on a full scholarship and I didn’t know anything about colleges). I had a traumatic experience at that place, and I was extraordinarily lucky to get into Vanderbilt. Transferring from School X to Vandy was like eating a Ruth’s Chris dinner after one straight year of White Castle. Yes, the prestige thing is silly (“HEY EVERYONE, I WENT TO RUTH’S CHRIS LAST NIGHT!”), and it is also silly to choose a school because it has more “prestige” (“RUTH’S CHRIS IS BETTER THAN THE OTHER STEAKHOUSE BECAUSE PEOPLE’S HEARD OF RUTH’S CHRIS”), but it sure pays to work your ass off in high school so you can get a quality education. I applaud you for your goal of getting straight A’s and I hope you won’t make me sad by giving up.</p>
<p>tsdad: I definitely agree with that. That’s the point of my sarcasm lol. I also claim that many people in a situation allowing them to acquire such abilities (regardless of the school) blow it by half-assing. I also said that people at HPY and other top schools do it. I see it all around me at Emory. We’re no better than anyone else. Some of us just had higher SAT scores than those at many other schools. My observation is that we are, as a student-body, just as disengaged in favorable aspects of an education, as youth in general (Today that is. I hear that older generations were much more engaged in general). Many of these people will get good grades (inflated or not) and get no real value from their education. Happens at all institutions. I’d imagine most people at top schools (including HPY) would avoid learning those skills if they had the choice as it would incur more academic rigor. Again, even they could avoid learning or improving such skills (they just need to get high grades by any means and then perform well on entrance exams). I’m trying to make mines worth it (even though I’m on fin.aid/scholarship) and would have done the same elsewhere. By the way, your experience gives me hope that I’m taking the right approach. Thanks. Those are the same things I am trying to get (and have gotten) from my college education.</p>
<p>Yes, the OP could end up at a “meaningful lesser” place than Vandy and Harvard like Emory or Rutgers (aren’t they good in sciences ts? As in really good?).This is me being facetious when I throw in Emory. Eversince we dropped to number 20 like a year ago, we are apparently on the decline and are suddenly inferior to the other top 20s including Vandy and Rice, in the eyes of prestige whores. People legit act as if our physical plant or teaching suddenly got worse as opposed to the change in USNWR methodology and its increased emphasis on the grad. rate and perception of guidance counselors. Measures which reward lack of rigor(seriously, imagine the grad. rate at a place w/a 3.5ish+ grad. gpa) and prestige respectively (I mean, notice how MIT got screwed. I think their academics are amazing and far more rigorous than almost all of the top 10, but rigorous in a good way. Oh well, they aren’t graduating enough people. And apparently Harvard is so darned popular among guidance counselors, with their infinite influence on our college choices). Sherman might as well come back from the dead and burn us down :p</p>
<p>Legal Shark: I could somewhat agree. I come from a similar situation. However, I chose Emory after visiting several places (visiting classes and stuff) and actually chose it b/c I wanted to stay in Ga. or in the south, and b/c it was actually really good for what I wanted, moreso than the prestige. I personally never knew it had more prestige than a place like Georgia Tech or UGA. I just knew that the classes were smaller, and the teachers seemed better. I liked it. I didn’t assume it was particularly good before applying. Most of the elite college applicants on the other hand, do assume that top 20s are great in every field for UG education, and often apply blindly based on ranks and choose the highest ranked program they can be admitted to or can afford. Do you know how many idiots here come here and are disappointed because we don’t have engineering. They didn’t even do research about us, and came based on: “I didn’t get into Penn”. When I tell them, “if you were considering engineering, why did you not consider Georgia Tech?”, they are like: “I can’t go there, hardly no one up north knows about them” or “It’s a public school” (by the way most assume that Georgia Tech is easier than Emory/top privates because it is a public schools). The idiocy/ignorance of these students who have lived their lives in these bubbles astounds and highly disappoints me at times. Some of them are as elitist enough to view engineering as “stupid” (and they are pre-meds, like the most stupid science majors on campus. All they want is grades, and complain when asked to learn something in high depth, or when they are threatened w/grade below A-. I’m sure this culture is similar elsewhere). Point is: Making choices based upon merely prestige w/o really trying to get to know the school is stupid in my opinion. The best for USNWR is not the “best” for everyone. Many other schools are excellent in the fields many of these students want to pursue and I fear so many of them don’t even know this because they live w/their nose in the air and even scoff at having to come to a place like Emory. At least Vandy’s 15% admit rate (really strange lol) makes people feel better about themselves. The fact that we have 25-30% is a source of shame (would these idiots feel ashamed if they went to Chicago? Actually not many of us are the Chicago types. Nowhere near as intellectually oriented). At Emory, many people don’t look at the actual quality of the school (in this case here), they say: “Well it ranks higher, and it has sports, it must be superior.” without even sitting in a class at the institution they speak of (surprisingly, people in the sciences may find that Emory is one of the more supportive schools. “Weeders” are really supportive as they are significantly smaller than most peers. This is really helpful.) Yes, so superior that they don’t belong there and could not gain admission for obvious reasons. They could hardly handle a holistic research process when selecting schools.</p>
<p>Here’s a little secret: if you look at the CEOs of Fortune 500 companies, few have undergraduate degrees from Ivies (or Ivy equivalents), and they are rarely the “smartest”" guys (or gals) at their own companies. Rather, they know how to mobilize human resources (including those of their Ivy subordinates) in ways that can creatively get the job done. It’s a different skill set.</p>
<p>Now if you plan to get your jollies from managing the bond investments of your roommates’’ parents 12-14 hours a day, an Ivy degree might indeed serve you well. And who knows? You might get the chance to trash an entire economy!</p>
<p>What I always think is so amusing about the focus on hedge funds, ibanking and mgt consulting is that these kids are so impressed by moving around chess pieces but don’t even get that someone had to create the value in those companies by creating innovative goods and services in the first place.</p>
<p>To be honest its not really investment banking that I like it’s the salary&bonuses. If I could choose a career ignoring pay I’d be a derm. Most people find skin rashes and stuff gross but I’m kind of fascinated by that kind of stuff lol. and I like talking and working with people so it would be nice to spend my whole day doing that and getting to move around and do stuff instead of sit in an office.</p>
<p>IDK how much most dermatologists make but I don’t think it’s about as much as Ibanking. :(</p>
<p>A dermatologist is one of the better paying specialties – lots of cash-only stuff that people gladly pay for – and it has a better quality of life in that you can have set office hours and no call (no emergency middle-of-the-night pimples, that kind of thing).</p>
<p>The average dermatologist salary in the U.S. is $249,999. That’s a pretty handsome living for an 8-5 job with good working conditions, even after paying back med school loans. </p>
<p>You won’t get fabulously wealthy, but the truth is most people who go into I-banking or consulting don’t, either. The hours are brutal, the work can be stressful, the burnout rate in those fields is high, and the firms are structured with the expectation of a high turnover rate among the more junior employees because if everyone makes partner, the average profits per partner go way down. So they WANT to burn out and outplace (after maybe 5-6 years) most of the new people who come in the door. A few people get fabulously wealthy. Most don’t.</p>
<p>And i’m sorry, anyone who can’t live on $250K/year has got seriously misplaced priorities in my book.</p>
<p>…The most important reason graduates of the Harvards, Yales, and Princetons had bigger salaries later in life was not because they had so many talented classmates at their selective alma maters but because of personal characteristics they brought with them to college – habits and tendencies that had developed long before they started calculating their grade point averages.</p>
<p>The two researchers studied 14,239 students at thirty colleges, ranging from the most selective, including Yale and Swarthmore, to much less picky schools like Denison and Penn State. They noted which schools had accepted and rejected which students, and they compared their subsequent earnings.</p>
<pre><code>Then they devised a strategy to implicitly adjust for students’ crucial “unobserved characteristics,” such as persistence, humor, and warmth, that might have influenced success, both in the admission game and in life…The researchers concluded, “Students who attended more selective colleges do not earn more than other students who were accepted and rejected by comparable schools but attended less selective colleges.”
</code></pre>
<p>@Bclintlock Well that’s kind of depressing… So basically the chances of joining the mega rich are extremely slim unless you’re an amazing entreprenuer or you marry well. I probably wouldn’t have lasted long anyway since I have 0 interest in finance other then the money infact I’d hate the job but would love the money. I love medicine and am kind of a science nerd :P. But medicine has a pretty low ceiling. Oh well at least I’ll love my job. But my mom won’t get to brag about her baby making millions. ;)</p>
<p>Why the desire to join the mega rich? What’s wrong with comfortable upper middle class? You are far overestimating how much money can buy happiness.</p>
<p>Well, doglover, my father was a hs dropout who joined the military, got his GED, and wound up joining that “mega-rich” (if by mega-rich you mean seven-figure income level for many years). He’s not academically smart, but he has incredible people skills, sales skills (could sell ice to Eskimos) and has an incredible eye for design which is relevant in his given field. There are all different ways of becoming rich. It’s a very, very narrow view of life that the only ways are through a given handful of schools.</p>